Salut! Soundings

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I wrote this for the Comment section of The National (Abu Dhabi). The editor kindly permits reproduction of my work here ... I should add that I do not accuse all gilets jaunes, still less those shown in the clip, of behaving like hooligans though many do ...

After 10 weeks of violent unrest, the question is not just how flawed Emmanuel Macron has been in response to the gravest crisis of his presidency, but what has gone wrong with France?

The gilets jaunes protest movement has seen several people die and many more hurt, buildings set on fire, motorways blocked and businesses and jobs threatened.

In part at least, it presents an ugly caricature of a nation defiantly proud of its historically rebellious streak. When the original cause, the rocketing cost of fuel, was rendered academic by falling prices at the pump and the withdrawal of a proposed new green tax, attention merely shifted to other issues.

Salut! has been around for 11 years. It has known more active times but springs to life every now and then and still attracts healthy numbers of people every day. I hope the substantial archives keep them occupied if they stay longer than to view the article that drew them in.

Today, I wish all those readers - new or old - a very happy Christmas and a healthy and prosperous new year. I have similar greetings and wishes for mankind and the planet.

For my image, I have imported my good friend Pete Sixsmith from the biggest of the my sites, Salut! Sunderland, which covers the ups and downs (lots of downs, in fact, but uppish at the moment) of Sunderland AFC.

Pete, who performs Santa duties each Christmas and can therefore, as of today, consider himself laid off for another year, is the site's finest writer by a country mile, though serious technical issues means no one can actually get as far as reading any of his work.

In fact, Bill Taylor has been a photographer for several years and his work has been published - not least here - and exhibited. He's also a fine writer and was writing finely even when an ability to do was not required of staff hired by those marvellous objects we used to call local newspapers. Let him take up the story of how his love of the still image has developed (and if you like what you find, treat yourself to his series of short stories about the earlier stages of a County Durham man's life in North America) ...

Funny thing, ambition. I’ve never much had any, except perhaps for a vague yearning to be a rock drummer. That, of course, never happened and never will. Charlie Watts can stop shivering in his brothel-creepers/winklepickers/corrective, anti-slip footwear for the elderly or whatever it is he wears.

He’s even older than I am and I believe, though definitions vary, that I absolutely should now count myself as old.

Readers will have gathered that I am not a great fan of blockades, where one group of people assume the right to stop everyone else going anywhere. I would allow them to demonstrate, and to ask for support, but not to impose the sort of disruption to life that we see on such a regular basis in France. I oppose capital punishment but might cheerfully guillotine anyone blockading fuel distribution depots and petrol stations (having first of course, filled their own tanks). Others will disagree and also question my belief that democracy by and large offers a reasonable if imperfect remedy, elections where the disgruntled can get rid of those in power who displease them. Here are my thoughts for The National, whose editor kindly permits reproduction here. The photo is another of those taken in Paris on Saturday by my friend and confrere Peter Allen ...

To be fair to the gilets jaunes, people voted in by no one to do anything but with a cause they wish to pursue all the same, they were not responsible for most of the appalling destruction and violence the world has seen in images from Paris ... blame the usual suspects: voyous, casseurs, fanatics whether or not attached to the far left or far right. I'll have more to say on this but here, with the consent of The National, is how I summarised Saturday's events ... with thanks to my friend and colleague Peter Allen for just one of the superb phoographs he took as the day progressed ...

Just now, the French president Emmanuel Macron probably has more on his mind than the long-awaited, much-delayed initiative he promises on how Islam in France should be organised. The weekend has seen widespread protests about the price of fuel at the pump. As ever, I am torn between admiration for the "up with this we shall not put" rebelliousness of the French and anger at the belief that it's perfectly OK to stop people going about their daily lives. At one blockade in Savoie, a women anxious to get her daughter to the doctor panicked when confronted by protestors and tried to drive on. She knocked over and killed a female demonstrator who probably had nothing to do with impeding her journey to the medical appointment. Desperately sad on all levels ...

But there remains the issue of whether a better, differently organised Islam would both satisfy Muslims and tackle extremism. I am grateful to The National for allowing me to reproduce my work here ...

A Muslim woman whose children attended the Mosaique youth centre in the small town of Ecquevilly, 35 minutes by train from Paris, wanted to go, too. But this was at a time when the town's Muslim community was under the influence of a charismatic but radical preacher. She insisted that there should be no music and no men present. The director of the centre explained that she would be most welcome provided she accepted the inclusive rules that applied to everyone. It was a clash of two strong minds, but the director's view prevailed and the woman started attending anyway.

That anecdote offers a bright footnote to the way Ecquevilly's more open-minded residents have coped with its unwanted status as a centre of dangerous Salafist indoctrination. I spent two days there trying to make sense of it all for The National, Abu Dhabi.

If attempts to rid Ecquevilly of a negative image are to succeed, that will in no small part be the result of the strength of character of that director of Moasique, Idriss Amazouz, quoted blow. The National, as ever, consents to the reproduction of my work here ... but I would also like to thanks two fine journalists from the French daly newspaper La Croix, Flore Thomasset and Anne-Bénédicte Hoffner, whose epic coverage stretching to several pages was the insertion for my own visit ...

A new book has just come my way. Reporting the Troubles brings together the stories of journalists who covered 30 years of civil conflict in Northern Ireland. It was edited by two outstanding practitioners of the reporting trade, Deric Henderson and Ivan Little, and is a valuable addition to the great body of published work on those sad times and the struggle to achieve and then maintain what the late Mo Mowlam, when NI secretary, used to call a 'flawed peace' ...

Just over half a century ago, an October Saturday in the city of Derry began in unseasonal sunshine but degenerated into deep gloom with a shameful attack by baton-wielding RUC officers on civil rights marchers.

Awful an event as this was, no one present is likely to have guessed that he or she was witnessing what many feel was the starting point of 30 years of bloody conflict in, according to taste or allegiance, Northern Ireland, Ulster, the Six Counties or simply "the North".

I shall do three things in respect of this weekend's 100th anniversary of the Armistice that ended the Great War. I shall reproduce two articles written many years ago which touched the horrendous events of 1914-1918, and I post (above) a clip of June Tabor singing the finest version I have heard of Eric Bogle's superb song, No Man's Land. If I wear poppies this weekend, there'll be two, red and white ....

Leave means Grieve. Others may have thought of my slogan first but I didn't see it on any of the placards held by marchers on the great anti-Brexit rally in central London.

I have witnessed scores of marches and rallies in my career as a journalist. I have been insulted, threatened and jostled, endured the effects of police tear-gassing, feared for my personal safety and, looking at the marchers and their varied causes, felt emotions ranging from sympathy to disgust.

Yesterday, for the first time in three score and 10 years of life, I attended a march as a marcher. My wife, French, joined her first since the Paris spring of 1968 and even that was in a provincial town, Le Mans, not at the Bastille or Place de la Republique in the capital.

This one mattered to both of us ... the great uprising against the looming catastrophe of withdrawal from the EU.